Warning right there online
Nikolas Cruz was a ticking time bomb — and he didn’t keep it a secret.
The FBI, classmates, teachers and neighbors all had ample warning the teen was seriously twisted, but nobody did anything before it was too late.
“Im going to be a professional school shooter,” a YouTube user named “Nikolas Cruz” wrote on one of vlogger Ben Bennight’s videos in September.
The Mississippi bail bondsman tipped off the feds and they responded “immediately” — but he couldn’t offer any more details and didn’t hear from the agency again until after Cruz allegedly slaughtered 17 people at his former high school on Wednesday, he told BuzzFeed.
“I wish I could have given them more information,” Bennight said in a video posted Wednesday. “People leave pretty heinous comments on a pretty regular basis on this channel, [but] this comment said, ‘I’m going to be a professional school shooter,’ and I knew that I couldn’t just ignore that.”
The FBI “conducted database reviews,” Rob Lasky, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Miami division, said at a press conference Thursday — but the bureau gave up because it was unable to further identify the person who made the comment.
“We do not know if it is the same person,” Lasky said. “We could not positively identify him . . . I’m not willing to say it was the same person.”
But Bennight wasn’t the only one who heard about Cruz’s plans — a former classmate told The Post that he’d made the threats before. “He’s been saying this stuff many times,” Marjory Stone- man Doug-glas Highgh School juniornior Sophia Serino,erino, 17, told Thee Post.
“My friendiend who knew him said that during freshman year, he was in the bathroom and [Cruz] was actually about to snap and plan this out and do it, but he talked him down off it.
“It wasn’t something that was spontaneous — I think he really planned this,” she added.
Cruz was expelled from the school after threatening other students including his ex-girlfriend, classmates said. But even before that, he may as well have been voted the student most likely to become a school shooter, they said.
“I think everyone in this school had it in the back of their mind that if anyone was supposed to do it, it was most likely going to be him,” Dakota Mutchler, 17, who attended middle school with Cruz, told The Washington Post.
Cruz scared away former friends by posting about guns and killing animals on Instagram, she said.
Neighbors saw the fuzzy carnage firsthand. He trained his dogs to kill and then let them attack a neighbor’s piglets, they told The Washington Post.
Another watched him kill a squirrel and try to feed it to his dogs, while yet another saw him stabbing a stick down rabbit boroughs.
“People were afraid of him,” acquaintance Brody Speno, who’d seen him try to kill squirrels and chickens, told the paper.